How we work: SEO sprints

Search engine optimisation (SEO) for your website can feel like a Sisyphean task. We’re glad the bad old days of keyword stuffing are behind us, but Google’s specific search ranking factors remain an ever-shifting mystery wrapped in an enigma.

We do know that Google bases the quality of a page (and subsequently, its search ranking) on its E-E-A-T principles—experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. It’s worth checking out their guidelines for content creators and we believe these will apply even more strongly as AI-powered search becomes more widespread.

That’s why investing in thought leadership content should be a key part of any B2B business’s marketing strategy. But beyond that, we also know that Google factors page experience into its search position, which is the driving force behind the SEO sprints we run for our clients at Articulate.

What’s an SEO sprint and how does it work? That’s what we’ll share in this article.

What’s an SEO sprint?

Each SEO sprint day is approximately eight hours of expert on-page and technical SEO (not including tea breaks!)

• On-page SEO is the practice of optimising specific web page content for search engines so that the expertise, experience and authority of the content is clear. For example, this might involve adding subheadlines, adding image descriptions and fixing broken links.
• Technical SEO is the practice of making individual pages and the site as a whole easier for a search engine to parse and improving the user experience. For example, we might compress images to make pages load faster or add XML schema text to communicate information about the page in a structured way.

During those eight hours, we work down a prioritised backlog of tasks. It could be one person’s job or divided up between a few people.

To create the backlog, we use a battery of diagnostic tools, including Ahrefs, Sitebulb, and our own Fizz+Ginger app. Once we have identified and prioritised the issues, we have a library of 20+ processes that we apply to fix them. This combination of technology, expertise and efficiency means that we can get a lot done in a short time.

In this article, we’ll cover those we do most frequently.

Our four golden rules of SEO sprints

We take a careful, conscientious approach to our SEO sprints. It’s like fixing a Swiss watch—if you’re heavy-handed, it’s easy to break something that takes far, far longer to fix. So we have four golden rules we apply to every SEO sprint we do.

1. Do no harm: We don’t change anything on a website or in its content that might be damaging. We make sure before we take any action that it won’t cause more harm than good.
2. Prioritise measurable impact: We can’t say that an action we take on your website will double your traffic. But we can say your site health score is 87 and we’re going to try to get it over 90. We’ll use tools and tactics that we think are going to get you there and will also have benefits for factors such as conversion rate and user experience.
3. Create proof of execution: If it isn’t documented it might as well not have happened. Our clients deserve detail and transparency. We provide that by adding details to our sprint plan (more on that later) including screenshots, annotations and results—cleaning as we cook.
4. Stuck? Phone a friend: If we’re not sure about something, we don’t bluff our way through it. First we look it up in our internal knowledge base, then research it. If we still don’t have a clear, reliable answer after that we message our Slack channel help-desk to ask the Articulate hive mind.

Tools for SEO sprints

Most of the tools we use to execute our SEO might be familiar. One might not be, because we developed it ourselves!

• Fizz and Ginger: This is the first tool we use in any SEO sprint and the one we developed in-house at Articulate Marketing. It’s a HubSpot integration that accelerates SEO, identifying the quick but impactful wins for common weaknesses such as meta descriptions and broken links. We use it as a diagnostic tool first to help plan the sprint, then as a way to implement optimisations during execution.
• Google PageSpeed Insights: Google PageSpeed Insights is in everyone’s browser bookmarks at Articulate. It’s a free tool that shows, at a glance, how your website measures up to Google’s performance benchmarks. Google bases the Core Web Vitals on your live website traffic. If you see any red, orange or yellow on your dashboard it means you need urgent SEO work to maintain or improve your search rankings.
• Ahrefs: Another Articulate favourite, Ahrefs is an SEO tool we use for our SEO sprints as well as our brand strategy and copywriting. For SEO sprints, we use it to check backlink performance and as a secondary check for broken backlinks.
• Sitebulb. This tool, like Screaming Frog and other scanners, gives a detailed, comprehensive technical scan of a website highlighting key opportunities for improvement.
• HubSpot: With access to a client’s HubSpot portal, we can run a site scan which flags up SEO-related issues that need to be fixed and ranks the importance of doing so. This includes missing alt tags on images, duplicate content and long content titles.
• GTMetrix: This tool takes Google PageSpeed Insights data and combines it with other data sources to provide more website performance metrics. We use it specifically for its visualisation and insights about loading times, including specific things affecting it (such as scripts or huge images.)
• Google Search Console: A staple for all digital marketing managers, Google Search Console’s Performance report can reveal the search queries that are bringing people to your site. This helps paint a picture of your content strategy’s effectiveness and highlights gaps. We also use it to check page experience, particularly for mobile users

How we plan and execute an SEO sprint

With our tools lined up and warmed up, we can dig into the details of our SEO sprint process.

Step 1. Create the sprint plan

To create an SEO sprint plan, we first build a backlog of tasks. To build the backlog, we break open our diagnostic toolkit and run our first scans on the website we’re working on. These are some of the most common issues (out 40+ that often come up) we’re looking for that add to our task backlog:

1. Missing or suboptimal meta descriptions: If you don’t provide a meta description for each of your indexed web pages (including blog posts), Google will show an excerpt of its choosing in search results instead. Meta descriptions help users quickly evaluate whether they think the search result is worth clicking on, so it pays to write a compelling one that includes any target keywords. Google can still decide to use an excerpt instead, but it’s a minuscule time investment for a potentially significant pay-off—more clicks and higher rankings.
2. Loading speed. Slow pages are bad for users, bad for SEO and bad for conversions. We have written about the risks of a poor Core Web Vitals score. Sites slow down for many different reasons, but diagnosing the issues and fixing them is a top priority. Sometimes the solution is straightforward, such as compressing images (see below) or removing unnecessary code from the site. Sometimes it requires ongoing tuning and optimisation.
3. Large images: Large images slow down page loading times, which negatively affects user experience and, subsequently, your search ranking factors. In principle, higher pixel density looks more attractive. But with more than 60% of web traffic now coming from mobile devices, there’s only so much detail most of your users will be able to see. We aim to reduce most imagery to 500KB or less to help optimise page loading speeds.
4. 404 errors: When you click a link and get a 404 error code, it means the page no longer exists. This can happen when you delete blog posts or retire landing pages and don’t remove the links you made from another page. Similarly, if you link to another website’s content and they remove it, users will encounter a 404. This doesn’t make for a great user experience, so Google includes websites’ volume of 404 codes in its search ranking factors.
5. 301 redirects: Redirects are important for SEO. If you’ve changed a URL or removed old, irrelevant or inaccurate content, redirects ensure users don’t encounter a 404 error (and bounce back to search results). They can also transfer a page’s ranking authority if you’re updating content but want to preserve the old page’s search performance. But redirects also slow down loading times for users. So in an SEO sprint, we identify links on your website or blog which are redirecting and try to replace them with flat links’—the new URL which contains no redirects.
6. Missing alt tags: Accessibility elements such as image alt text (alt tags) are not currently direct search ranking factors for Google. But search engine crawlers do include them during page indexing to understand how the imagery relates to the page. Improving your accessibility (including alt tags) is also part of being a good egg on the internet, ensuring that as many users as possible can benefit from your content. So locating and replacing missing alt tags is a key activity in an SEO sprint.
7. Broken incoming links: If you paid an authoritative website for a high-quality, editorial backlink, it could cost you up to $1500. So it pays to ensure that all of your incoming links, whether you paid for them or not, are still live. We check for broken incoming links as part of the sprint and set up redirects where we can.
8. Page one meta descriptions: One of your web pages made it to page one of Google’s search results for a target keyword? Victory! But, returning to our Swiss watch analogy, you need to maintain it regularly to preserve its performance. One way you can do this is by updating the meta description with more compelling copy to drive even more clickthrough.
9. Content audit: Once we’ve worked through the previous optimisation areas, we can turn our attention to a content audit. We use multiple tools to identify your top-performing pages (across metrics such as traffic, CTA clicks and incoming links), then review what you can do to optimise for search rankings. This might include changing or removing a previous year from a title, content updates, readability improvements or expanding short articles.

When we build the backlog, we include more than is achievable in the eight-hour sprint. That’s why we prioritise. We can return to try and complete the backlog in future sprints, but we know the most important, impactful optimisations are complete.

Step 2. Execute the sprint plan

We have our plan, now it’s time to sprint!

We work through the sprint plan in priority order, from top to bottom and follow our four golden rules. Despite the speedy connotations, we’re careful and thorough, completing a task in its entirety and with checks before we move on to the next one.

Step 3. Write proof of execution

We follow Step 2 and Step 3 simultaneously, adding proof of execution as we complete each task.

The changes we make during SEO sprint work can be imperceivable at a glance. Our clients put their faith (and invest their money) in us, so as we execute the sprint plan, we also create a clear record of our work. We use the sprint plan as our template so clients can see what we planned to do, what we did, and what we weren’t able to achieve due to unforeseen blockers.

Proof of execution might look like:

• A table showing ‘before and after’ numbers or words such as file sizes or meta descriptions
• Screenshots of performance reports before and after optimisations
• Commentary about changes and any barriers to execution

Ready, set, SEO!

Know your SEO engine needs fine-tuning but not sure where to start? We’re here to help. We’re expert HubSpot partners supported by experienced designers, developers and copywriters who know how to dial website performance up to eleven. Get in touch with our team and we’ll discuss how we can boost your SEO.